Saturday, January 05, 2008

'Tell the story! Tell the story!'With his "big oil epic" starring Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson is no longer American cinema's enfant terrible. All he wants to do now is spin a good yarn, he tells Ed Pilkington

It is 10 years since Paul Thomas Anderson first left audiences and critics dumbstruck and confounded with his breakthrough film Boogie Nights, when he was just 27. How could such a pipsqueak of a director, they asked back in 1997, create a masterpiece that wowed right from its opening sequence: an audacious five-minute tracking shot that swoops and swirls through the nightclub of the film's title in joyful synchronisation to the dance music of the 1970s.

He has astonished ever since. Magnolia, the next out of the blocks, was an even bigger, more complex and yet richly evocative film that belied any attempt to categorise it. He was 31 by then, but still people marvelled at how one so young could conjure up such accomplished work. Anderson appeared to have found his style - the repertory film in which a multitude of characters and plot-lines are interwoven. But then in 2002 he bamboozled us again. He threw out the repertory technique and opted instead for a radically scaled-down and linear story in Punch-Drunk Love. It ran at a conventional 90 minutes - half the length of Magnolia - and though the film was anything but conventional, it left many fans delighted, others disappointed.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

American Epic 'There Will Be Blood'Director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis on blood, oil, and how 'Gangs of New York' probably isn't Day-Lewis's most mom-friendly performance.

Quiet, stoic, and self-reliant Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) rapidly transforms into a wealthy tycoon when he discovers oil in the hard scrub of Southern California and is then driven by an almost demonic desire to extract the riches from the land he has acquired, regardless of the physical and spiritual price to himself and to the people who live there. Plainview eventually meets his match in the supposedly unassuming and deeply religious Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young yet quietly ambitious preacher in the charismatic tradition. The two recognize the same desire and ambition for power in one another and become locked in a bitter struggle that will bleed from one century into another.

The origins of There Will Be Blood can be traced to a bookstore in London, where homesick Paul Thomas Anderson spotted the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, which then became an unlikely life raft for the struggling writer/director.

Paul Thomas Anderson famously dropped out of NYU film school after just a couple of days, intent on beginning a career making movies. It worked: At 26, the writer-director released a remarkable debut feature, 1996's Hard Eight, which featured several actors that would become part of his troupe, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, and Philip Baker Hall. Anderson's real breakthrough, though, came via 1997's Boogie Nights, a simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking ensemble piece set in the porn industry. His even more sprawling Magnolia—another melancholy love letter to southern California—earned Oscar nominations and high praise; he followed that with the unsentimental, beautifully off-kilter romantic comedy Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler. Then Anderson seemed to disappear.

It turned out he was working on his magnum opus. The film, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stars Daniel Day Lewis in a remarkable performance as a single-minded 19th-century oil prospector. A departure from Anderson's other films, Blood ditches modern-day L.A. and his regular group of actors and focuses largely on one character—Day Lewis is in nearly every scene of the 158-minute film—and the effect of his dark drive on those around him, particularly a young preacher played by Paul Dano. One of 2007's best films, it renders this seemingly small story huge and powerful. A jovial Anderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Day Lewis, the melancholy of finishing work, and "message movies."

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Daniel and Henry together, drunk. Sitting and talking. Daniel is nodding off. So drunk he can't keep his eyes open. DANIEL He's not my son. He's not even my son.HENRY What do you mean?DANIEL He's not my son... He begins to break down, holds his crotch, looks down; DANIEL ...my cock doesn't even work how'mI gonna make a kid?does yours work Henry? our Father's worked well, look at you. HOLD. DANIEL I asked you a question...HENRY ...when I'm lucky.